Two armies are battling, one from the present and the other from the past.
Automaton soldiers are wriggling free of their terra-cotta skins, born with marks stamped in their foreheads and carrying antique weapons made of bronze, wood, and bone. The team of human mercenaries that followed Leizu inside are struggling in the darkness, some barking out commands, others firing weapons randomly at the obsidian monsters, chips of rock spraying from the ceiling and ricocheted bullets pinging off stone pillars.
The sun disk is still somewhere above me, embedded in sculpted rock.
Below, a man in Kevlar armor is thrown like a rag doll, bouncing off the base of the throne and landing on his back. The man’s shoulder is twisted at a bad angle, the impact of something big having caved it in. Eyes rolling in pain, he spots me staring down at him. Frantically, the commando claws at the snub-nosed machine gun strapped over his chest, trying to aim the barrel at me.
I squeeze myself against the dark, sculpted folds of rock. Body tensed, I’m trying to make myself small, waiting to feel the cold trauma of bullets ripping into my back.
Nothing happens.
In the swirling dust below, I see the muscular figure of Peter. He has impaled the wounded soldier with a long spear. Now he’s dragging the man screaming back into the fray, protecting me during my ascent.
Coughing in the haze of clay dust, I turn away from the grisly sight.
Jamming one foot into a dragon’s mouth, I push myself up. Marveling at the complexity of this sculpture, I focus on my own hands and feet, always climbing. Finally, I feel something strange—my scalp prickling from a faint static electricity.
Almost there.
Huangdi’s voice pulsates from somewhere nearby, indistinct and growling. The top of the throne in sight, I haul myself up and peek over. The emperor has descended to the cleared-off space at the foot of the dais, ringed by tall pillars. Bullets are spraying at him from the darkness, most absorbed by row after row of the soldier machines. Surrounded by black-armored warriors, Huangdi bellows a challenge.
Across from him, calm in the eye of the storm, Leizu circles.
The old man raises his scepter, ignoring the chips of his body that spray off in flakes as bullets spit through the ranks of his armored defenders. He clenches his fist and with an electrical snap, the scepter sprouts a long base, becoming a staff.
“To me!” he shouts.
As Huangdi speaks, a slurring moan resonates across the cavern—the clay soldiers are also speaking, mindlessly repeating his words with hard, broken lips.
Leizu waits for Huangdi, the relics built into her armor glinting like beetle shells. Between them, the air shimmers with motes of powder from bullet-pulverized ceramics. Broken pieces of terra-cotta men are heaped around them, and in the darkness of the cavern a dwindling number of mercenary soldiers continue fighting ranks of ancient warriors.
An elbow hooked over the throne, I run my other hand blindly across the back of the carved surface, desperately searching for the black disk I saw earlier.
The emperor spins his iron staff in slow circles. As he does, its sculpted contours begin to glow gold-white. Twirling, it draws a golden circle. His robe has disintegrated completely, falling from his shoulders to reveal a surprisingly agile ceramic body painted in gold and silver.
“The Yellow God is risen,” he says, voice mimicked a hundred times over. “Submit to me, Leizu.”
In a blur, the light and dark fall into each other.
I feel a slight tremor of electricity tickle my fingertips—the static pattern I felt earlier. My fingers slide across a smooth metal circle embedded in the carved rock.
The sun disk.
“Rend her,” growls the emperor, and the voices of a multitude rumble through the cave like far-off thunder. “Take her to pieces.”
I pry the plate out of the back of the throne. It comes away slowly, only set in a decorative fitting. Deceptively heavy, the artifact is still warm as I slide it into my backpack.
One foothold at a time, I lower myself down the throne.
Nearing the bottom, I see a pile of corpses sprawled over the floor. The figures are mostly made of black and broken machinery, but I also spot a few of Leizu’s helmeted mercenaries. Standing over the mound of carnage is Peter, hands up to catch me.
“June,” he calls. “I am here.”
I let go and fall into his arms.
Sporadic gunfire chatters as the last of Leizu’s mercenaries fight for their lives in the darkness. On the other side of the throne, I can hear Huangdi and Leizu battling. I grab Peter by the arm and drag him in the other direction, toward the breach in the far wall.
“Wait,” he says, looking back.
Around us, the ranks of clay warriors are shoving past without stopping, closing in around the throne. Leizu is pacing, looking for a way out as the crush of hundreds of soldiers presses in. Shafts of light pour from Huangdi’s staff, turning lazy circles, the beams cutting through dancing motes of shattered pottery.
Leizu spins and slices through a row of clay defenders. Her mercenary soldiers are gone now, motionless humps, bodies clothed in advanced fabrics and still clutching high-tech weaponry. Another row of warriors replaces the last, pushing Leizu closer to Huangdi. He lifts the staff over his head like a baseball bat, brings it down.
The impact shatters her dark armor.
Leizu falls to a knee as scales of armor spray into the air, tumbling and rolling through thick dust. For an instant, each individual relic bursts into light, symbols streaking through darkness. The light fades as the artifacts soar deeper into the cavern, rolling through clay powder, landing at our feet.
Peter drops to his knees, pawing through the mess.
“No!” I shout, grabbing his shoulder. “We’ve got to go!”
On all fours, he keeps rooting through the slivers of warm metal, holding up relics to inspect them and then tossing them down. Surging around Leizu’s fallen body, the terra-cotta warriors are starting to turn their attention back to the cavern. Eternally smiling obsidian faces flash in the light from Huangdi’s staff.
“We have to go now,” I repeat, trying to pull Peter away from the mess of scattered relics.
Lunging forward, he gathers up a few random pieces and jams them into his webbed pockets, allowing me to pull him up.
“Right behind you,” he says. “Go.”
The sun disk is a heavy lump in my pack as I hunch over and bolt away into the cavern. Yanking my shirt over my nose to block the dust, I sprint toward the dim light of the breach made by Leizu’s soldiers. I don’t slow until the throne is safely behind me.
“Peter—” I start, turning, but he’s gone, disappeared into the haze.